Once a Funeral Home, Inwood Pharmacy Now a Gathering Place

Manny Ramirez, right, chats with customer David Rodriguez at the Dichter Pharmacy in Inwood.

Craig Warga for The Wall Street Journal

A former funeral home in Inwood is now a place where Girl Scouts hold their meetings, preschoolers play and artists display their works.

Manny Ramirez reopened his Dichter Pharmacy in the old mortuary almost a year ago after a 2012 fire destroyed the business, which has operated in the neighborhood in some form since 1923. The new address is 4953 Broadway near West 207th Street, just feet from where it had been.

With the extra space, Mr. Ramirez opened a soda fountain in the pharmacy and decided to use the basement—formerly an embalming room—to host community events free of charge.

“It’s like Smallville here,” said Mr. Ramirez, who went to grade school around the corner and has owned the store since 2007. “It’s exciting. It’s the fulfillment of a community.”

Locals quickly began embracing the spot. There was a violin recital on the ground floor last June, in the section dedicated to an old-fashioned soda fountain and diner that sells $7 gluten-free wraps, $2 raspberry sorbet, and “NYC’s best bagel—the best you’ve ever had” for $1.50.

Then in July, a poetry group met downstairs. Then a preschool group showed up in October, followed by a flute performance in December, a Jewish group in January and a book club in February. This month, a Girls Scout troop began meeting there. The groups meet weekly, including a Monday night session called Artists Anonymous—for artists who are struggling to produce, not struggling with addiction.

On a bulletin board at the entrance—under the three plaques of appreciation for Mr. Ramirez from a local Little League team—are a business card from a Julliard-trained piano teacher; a pamphlet about a group called Milkin’ Mamas, which accepts donated breast milk; and a placard from Inwood Jews, the group that meets at Dichter every Thursday and has a monthly Sabbath dinner downstairs, imploring locals to “get high—on Judaism.”

The pharmacy also has become an unlikely gallery space. There are 11 paintings on display from Robert Garlick, a 78-year-old retired film editor who has lived in Inwood for 13 years, filling his days mostly by working at the gift shop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and opining that his work “fell through the cracks of art-world labels.”

A book club meets in the basement at the Dichter Pharmacy in Inwood. The pharmacy provides a gathering space for the community, whether it be a book club, music performance, or birthday party.

Craig Warga for The Wall Street Journal

“Manny is genuinely interested in providing a community versus so much of our society setting up art and artists in a box off to the side,” said Mr. Garlick. “Manny is showing art can be part of your everyday experience. That art doesn’t have to be about speculation and collecting, but just communicating.”

To be certain, the pharmacy itself is still popular both for pharmaceuticals (Metformin, a diabetes drug, is the most common drug among its customers), herbal remedies (arnica, an ointment for soreness, is a storewide top seller), old-fashioned wooden toys, and even newer items such as a men’s line of haircare products.

But the community events are also a draw, brightening the works hours of Mr. Ramirez’s employees.

“The first time you see their face light up that they have a place to show their art, or try their poetry, or just have a party, it is pretty cool,” said Levy Reyes, a 29-year-old stocker from the neighborhood who uses the basement to practice both his poetry and mixed martial arts.

Dana Wax, a 28-year-old graduate student in public health at New York University, said her mother was nervous when she moved to Inwood eight months ago from the Financial District.

“I’m from the Midwest, from Cleveland, and my mother still wants that small-town feel for me,” said Ms. Wax. “I have it here. I’m friends with Manny on Facebook. I feel at home here.”

She said she realized Dichter was different when the staff helped her find cheap glucosamine for her cat’s arthritis.

“It’s full-service here,” she said with a laugh. “Humans. Animals. Ice-cream lovers. Everyone.”

Downstairs, as the book club convened for the first time and discussed Colum McCann’s “Let The Great World Spin,” about Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk across the Twin Towers in 1974, uproarious cheers spilled from the soda fountain counter upstairs. David Rodriguez, a 46-year-old childhood friend of Mr. Ramirez, was dazzling the staff with card tricks, including one in which he shuffled a bent card into a deck, only to blow on the deck and have the top card bend on the spot.